In a dramatic birth, an elephant in Thailand gave birth to a rare set of twins, injuring the caregiver as he attempted to save one of the babies.
At the Ayutthaya Elephant Palace and Royal Kraal north of Bangkok on Friday night, the 36-year-old Asian elephant known as Jamjuree gave birth to a male elephant weighing 80 kg (176 pounds).
However, eighteen minutes later, a second, sixty-kilogram female calf appeared, and the mother lost it and attacked her new baby.
“We heard somebody shout ‘there is another baby being born!'” said veterinarian Lardthongtare Meepan.
Mahouts, or elephant keepers, intervened to stop the mother from hitting her baby, but they also suffered an ankle injury in the process.
“The mother attacked the baby because she had never had twins before it’s very rare,” said Michelle Reedy, the director of the Elephant Stay organisation, which allows visiting tourists to ride, feed and bathe elephants at the Royal Kraal centre.
“The mahouts who are the carers of the elephants jumped in there trying to get the baby away so that she didn’t kill it,” Reedy told AFP.
Now that Jamjuree has accepted her offspring, a special platform has been constructed to enable the little animals to reach up and nurse.
According to Ladthongtare, they are also receiving additional pumped milk via syringe.
According to the research organization Save the Elephants, twin elephants are extremely uncommon—they make up only 1% of births—and male-female twin births are even less common.
According to Reedy, mothers frequently do not have enough milk for both calves, and the two may not have survived in the wild.
“Whether the rest of the herd may have intervened they may have, but the baby may have been trampled in the process,” she said.
According to Reedy, a large number of the 80 elephants housed at the center were saved from being beggars on the streets. This was a widespread practice following the 1989 moratorium on logging, which forced mahouts to find other ways to support their elephants while working in the field.
The practice, which was banned in 2010, involves the animals pulling off tricks like carrying fruit baskets or playing footballs.
At Royal Kraal, several elephants transport visitors to the neighboring temples and ruins of Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Siam.
Elephant riding is opposed by many conservation groups on the grounds that it stresses the animals and frequently entails cruel training.
The center makes the case that the rides help to save the species, which is in danger of extinction in China and Southeast Asia, by allowing the animals to interact and exercise.
The WWF estimates that there are just 8,000–11,000 Asian elephants left in the wild.
The animals were formerly common, but poaching, encroachment by humans, and deforestation have severely reduced their population.
According to Thai tradition, the twin calves—whose father is a 29-year-old elephant named Siam—will be given names seven days after they are born.
